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The e-mail part of the newsletter consists of the News and Events section. All links to other articles will take you to our website. News and Events: Web Content: Connecting with Customers A Writer's World: Lessons from Star Wars in Information Management September Meeting Report The Wandering Eye: Search Tools Single Sourcing with XML and XSLT From the President's Desk: It's All in the Mix That was Fun
The Society for Technical Communication is an individual membership organization dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences of technical communication. It is the largest organization of its type in the world. Its 25,000 members include technical writers and editors, content developers, documentation specialists, technical illustrators, instructional designers, academics, information architects, usability and human factors professionals, visual designers, Web designers and developers, and translators - anyone whose work makes technical information available to those who need it. The STC Toronto Chapter was founded in 1959 (then the Society of Technical Writers) and is the largest chapter in Canada. About this Newsletter: This newsletter is produced monthly by the STC Toronto Chapter and is sent to all registered members. If you have any feedback or ideas, please e-mail editor Philip Kahn at: newsletter@stctoronto.org Our mailing list comes directly from the STC, so if you want to receive the newsletter at another address you will need to login to their members profile section and update your information. The STC Toronto Chapter will not share nor sell our address list and will only send e-mails with information we believe to be useful and relevant to our members. |
That was Fun
by Keith Soltys Sometimes a technical writer has to be a bit of a detective. Yesterday I was working on an Operations Guide for a new product. In the section on networking, one of the network engineers had given me a list of hardware, inluding "SAN with redundant JNI connections". I ususally expand acronyms, especially if they're unfamiliar, but I wasn't sure what JNI was. I looked it up in the ever-expanding glossary that I keep and found JNI = Java Native Interface. That didn't make sense in context, so I emailed the network engineer, and asked him if he knew what it was. Got the reply back: "Nope. Nobody here knows what it stands for." OK. Back to the Tech Encyclopedia. Look up the definition of JNI and send it back to the the network engineer. "This is all I've been able to find for it, but it's obviously not it. Any suggestions?" A few minutes later, I get a reply. "It's the name on the cards. They're made by a company that got bought by somebody else, but nobody knows what it stands for." OK, now we're getting somewhere. I typed in "www.jni.com' into my browser and a company web page for JNI Corporation. They'd been bought by AMCC and the page redirected me the AMCC web site, where I found the page for the JNI cards. They turn out to be host-bus adapters, which connect a fibre-optic data connection from the SAN (storage area network) to the servers. Mystery solved. Sometimes, it's fun. I probably should have been a research librarian, but that's another story. Keith Soltys has been working as a technical writer for 16 years, and is currently at the Toronto Stock Exchange. He maintains the Internet Resources for Technical Communicators web site and has recently started a weblog. He lives in Pickering with his wife, two children, a cat, and an ever growing collection of Grateful Dead CDs. |
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